The Ultra168 Footpoint Awards – 2011 Best Performances

As the year draws to a close, we thought it would be great to highlight some of the standout performers of the year with the Ultra168 awards very kindly sponsored by the good folk over at Footpoint Shoe Clinic. But rather than us decide who deserves the recognition, we thought it would be apt to ask our readers what you thought.

We’ve come up with a few simple categories, and over the course of the next five days, we’ll be posting a poll a day, asking you to tell us who you think should win each award. We’ll then close it off and announce the results early in the new year. The categories are:

Best male performance of 2011

Best female performance of 2011

Most consistent performer of 2011

Most improved runner in 2011

Best over 50 performance in 2011

For those that win one of our awards, rather than have a random trophy, we thought it would be nice to award them with a top of the range Salomon technical t-shirt and the name of the award emblazoned on the back of the shirt to remind all those who run with them just how good they are 🙂

For those of you who make the effort to give us your vote, we’ll draw a name at random and throw you a couple of tubs of Perpetuem for your trouble, valued at $130. So without further ado, here is our first poll for male performance of the year. Watch out for our female poll coming tomorrow!

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I'm a mediocre runner who can bat above his average when I train hard. A man of extremes, I do enjoy everything life offers and consider it an absolute pleasure just to be able to put one foot in front of the other and let my mind wander somewhere different.

I witnessed 4 of them and was at the back of the field for a couple of others (GOW, YY, Tan, B2H and GNWx2). All really impressive runs and could go with any of them. Watching Chris mechanically take apart the Youies, Julian’s metronomic smoothness over the GOW or Stu’s steely eyed determination in the hunt for the record at B2H were all inspiring runs. But as a 100 mile runner, personally it would be hard to go past AV’s flawless run at GNW. Not that I want to influence Charlie’s vote. 🙂

I think the run of Mike Le Roux gets the nod. Fastest time ever for an Aussie over the ‘Blue Ribbon’ trail distance of 100 miles. Not to mention beating the course record by almost 1 hr. Every other run worth a mention also. Tough call really.

Lots of great race day performances listed, Mike le roux narrowly wins out for me.
Not only did he smash a long standing record, he also did it whilst racing the record holder, along with many of australias well credentailed runners.
Shame we could not vote on the top 3 performances, with a points system as i feel real bad leaving some of the others out.
Top effort by everyone on the list.

Thanks for voting John. We did discuss a number of different ways to do the voting, but we want also to make it as easy as possible for people too, and clicking one button was always going to be the best way to do it. Plus it made people make a decision too 🙂 thanks for your comments though, as we get more sophisticated I’m sure next year we’ll have an even better voting system for everyone to play with!

I normally avoid polls…and I can’t even recall how I got here…but it seems you have left a word out of the poll: Australian. There were at least 2 outstanding ultra performances by international athletes in Australia last year that would merit inclusion in the current poll (and which, in my view, really should be included): Killian Jornet in TNF100 (course record) and Christophe le Saux in The TRACK (520km stage race). It’s fair enough to vote for the best performance by an Australian, but I think a more meaningful poll should include all performances in Australia, irrespective of the nationality of the athlete. (Which reminds me…I’m not sure of Stu Gibson’s present nationality, but was he Australian at the time of his cited performances? I don’t want to exclude him from this poll – for the same reason I’d like to see Killian and Christophe included, but I seem to recall there was some issue last year with his status on a national representative team.)

In any case, well done on a very professionally presented web site (and thanks).

Thanks for your comments Andrew. You’re right, we did miss out the word Australian, and just assumed that people would understand what we were trying to do. Just to give some rationale, we decided not to include some of the international performances based on the fact that we wanted to have Australian (and in some cases NZ) representation for the awards first and foremost. Indeed some of the nationalities could be a little blurry at times, but given that both stu and mike le roux live in Australia, we deemed it ok to include them too.

I agree that it will never be perfect in terms of whom we decide to include and who we don’t, but hopefully we can give recognition to some of the standout performances of 2011. Thanks for your kind comments too about the website, we’re always looking to improve things, so the more comments the better we reckon!

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